The Next Not Fight, or Fight 55 Didn't Work Out as Planned
by Zinfandelli
Summary: Pitch finds himself in an odd situation, and makes the most of it. Things are coming to light within him that he would prefer stay forever in darkness, but light does things to one's insides, and he dreads the day he doesn't care, or more accurately, the day he does. (Waiting for You series, Blackice)


Wow, ok. Sorry, guys. ffnet like corrupted the document to the max and i had no idea! here's the fixed version. I hope this one works. i'll keep checking so it doesn't fuck all up

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"Stop this."

The boy curls into his lap. The darkness is encroaching, it's barely past evening. Their fight lasts less than an hour.

Somehow, and Pitch is not sure of the specifics, Jack threw him to the earth and knocked the air right from his lungs. In the middle of wheezing it back into himself, a hand at his throat, his scythe a mess of glitter across the leaves, a coldness settled across his thighs.

He brings a hand up to throttle the sprite before he can get a move in against him, but his fingers brush Jack's cheek and a soft upset groan accompanies a slushy tear that melts down his thumb. Pitch stills, his breath finally calmed, and Jack shifts. Jack hugs his arms into his chest lying across Pitch's lap and turns his head just slightly to bury his face into the folds of the robe bunched across his stomach, his knees tuck in and press into his hip. He looks impossibly small.

"Get off." Pitch whispers in a quiet threat. His hands hover over Jack's shoulders unsure of what to do. The forest around them feels close and intimate, the noises muffled, whispering is the only appropriate way to speak in such an atmosphere.

Jack replies with muffled dissent, and Pitch feels the small hands pressed between Jack and his legs turn and clutch onto his pants. His own fingers twitch and he frowns.

What is going on? Not a half hour ago Jack was beaming and taunting and throwing cold harsh enough to frost his ears off, the next moment he was kicking him right out of the air to crash bodily against fallen trees, and now this?

Pitch is stunned where he sits and his fingers ghost down Jack's shoulder and side not daring to touch. He watches Jack as the light slowly fades, the quiet breathing punctuated with little gasps and huffs, the way his shoulders tense on the inhale and shudder slightly on the exhale, how his toes curl and dig into the dirt.

"Jack, Stop this." Pitch fumbles for the will to push him off.

"No."

"If you don't get off of me in ten seconds I will throttle you." The threat in his voice is practically non-existent.

"Do it."

He sighs in defeat quickly, and Jack just seems to curl in tighter. Running a hand through his own hair, Pitch looks up and finds heavy gray clouds. A spike of fear brings his attention back and he looks down at the boy that has yet to move. It crescendos into an audible gasp, he tastes the moment it sparks into determination. Jack Frost uses his fear. It is an art the boy developed, as intricate and subtle as the frost he weaves. Right now it springs from a deeply ingrained place. Pitch takes in its cadence instead of its subject. It's not the driving force behind this turn from the fight, it is just this momentary spike and need within him, he needs it to force his words – whatever they turn out to be.

"Pitch." Jack turns his head, exposing the side of his face to crack a bruised eye open to look up at the Nightmare King looming above him.

Pitch is almost lost in the swirls of his fear. His eyes closed, he hums out his acknowledgement that Jack has spoken his name.

Fists scrunch up his pant leg and Pitch looks down at Jack.

"Pitch…-" Jack mumbles, and the fear peaks again. It's not terror, nothing so ineloquent as terror. It's…humiliations and rejections. It's a fear of loss and boldness. Since when has Jack ever feared consequences? Oh. Oh…

"-Touch me."

And the fear crashes in unsung waves. No one in the history of time itself will ever know how Pitch Black perceives a person. He hesitates for a moment, just to see what Jack will do. The fear plateaus with this seeming rejection. Jack slides so quickly into resignation. He begins to lift himself from Pitch's lap, a huff on his lips. It takes him a moment and Pitch smiles as he watches Jack sit up, his head bowed, the kid trying to school his features into something resembling nonchalance, before looking up.

This is the most beautiful part.

Jack looks up, his eyes a raw sort of purple from a black eye and tears, a smirk across his lips in the thinnest mask Pitch has ever seen. He opens his mouth for some half-thought witty retort to brush off his indiscretion as a joke or a taunt or whatever, and Pitch derails him once again.

He wraps his arms around the boy's shoulders and pulls him into a hug. Jack splutters as his face is pressed into the robe across his chest and Pitch smiles. His fear is confused. He gives Jack what he asks for but the boy doesn't understand why, he doesn't get the game.

How fragile he seems tucked into Pitch's chest. His emotions on display to play with at his whim. How easy it is to guide him in this way, contrasting so beautifully with how infuriatingly difficult it is to best him physically. Giving him what he asks for is possibly just as shattering as refusing.

A moment passes and the fear melts away. Emotions not under Pitch's domain take over, his game is finished. It's Jack's turn to seek his reward.

And he does.

Smoothly, Jack draws his hands out from between them and wraps his arms around Pitch's middle. He squeezes slightly as he draws himself once again onto Pitch's lap, twisting to sit across his legs while still being able to press his face into the robe. His hands then fall away and tuck back into the space between where their stomachs touch and he sighs out a shaky breath.

"Like this then?" Pitch questions as his thumb begins to rub absently back and forth against one of Jack's shoulders.

Jack nods and hums an affirmative.

And they sit like this until evening turns fully into night, until the trees are darker than the clouds and no light touches them. The darkness makes this intimate, the silence almost romantic.

Pitch finds that he doesn't mind it at all. In fact, he might even go so far as to say it's pleasant. Jack, a cool weight against him, is silent, and there is no banter or violence between them. Neither one is trying to hurt the other with words like razors sharper than his sand or Jack's ice. The fear from the boy is dormant, nothing prickles or draws attention, he is relaxed against him.

He is struck by how odd this really is.

Little things have been shifting between them. The mood is subtly evolving. Jack has made a right nuisance of himself pestering Pitch in his home and across the globe between their bouts. Their fights have drawn closer, they often forgo weapons for bare fists.

Sometimes, if Jack doesn't visit for longer than a week, Pitch finds himself restless. Things are changing. He isn't sure if he likes it or not. His existence has always been solitary, just him in the dark, alone. Now, a point of light floods in, adds texture to previously bland shadows. Forms are emerging from the gloom, things foreign and vaguely sinister. Things like pleasure and hope. Desire and comfort. Things Pitch has no idea what to do with, and he finds as he lets them sit there festering alongside his mind that they don't go away. These 'emotions' are just as much a bother as their source and he doesn't know how to handle them. Just as he let Jack insidiously worm his way into this relationship with him he finds these foreign feelings taking root and becoming ordinary.

Jack shifts.

Pitch looks down, refocusing his gaze on the mop of white hair against his chest. He finds his one hand with its thumb still rubbing the boy's shoulder and his other slowly, rhythmically, stroking up and down Jack's side. He stills his wayward hands. Jack draws in a deep breath and holds it.

A quiet voiceless laugh jostles Jack as he exhales and quickly the illusion shatters. The calm disappears and Pitch feels a sinking awkwardness grab his stomach, a humiliation at realizing what they are doing. His hands grip the sprite by the shoulders and he is about to push him off but lukewarm fists, heated by his own body, are quicker and press against his own shoulders. Jack's small weight picks up and forces him back. The sudden movement catches him off-guard and Pitch falls to the ground, pinned by Jack on top of him.

Jack pulls himself completely on top of Pitch and folds his arms across his chest, resting his chin on his wrists looking down at Pitch whose mouth is gaping open in disbelief.

"What-?" Pitch fumbles for any form of language.

"I win." Jack quips in a sort of half-hearted glee.

"I don't…What?"

"I've pinned you. Quickest fight yet. I Win."

"Have you really?" Pitch's voice is a deep rumble, he can tell Jack feels it by the way the boy tenses against him.

Jack knows his claim is flimsy. He hasn't really won. Both of them caved here and bravado or confidence won't convince either of them otherwise. Pitch doesn't force the issue.

He watches as Jack tilts his head to the side resting his cheek against his arm instead and the tension flows out of him on his exhale. The earth beneath him is warmer than the body on top, and the boy closes his eyes.

Pitch sighs next, shifting his gaze away and upwards. He feels Jack's breathing pause and synch up with his own rhythm of rise and falls. A thin calm creeps back in.

He should want to shove the kid off, to resume the fight, to finish what they really came here for. It won't be worth it if Pitch doesn't crawl away with broken limbs and deep contusions to remind him for a week of what transpired. Memories aren't his center, he needs evidence.

"This is nice." Jack mumbles as he opens his eyes, looking off to the side.

Pitch is about to reply with a shove to Jack's head when he continues.

"They don't know me."

"...The Guardians?"

"No. Yeah….Everyone." Jack replies on a sigh of an exhale.

He glances down his nose at Jack who is still turned away. A small spiral or that groping sinister fear Jack carries with him almost constantly creeps back in, that he is alone. Pitch's hands are resting on Jack's hips before he can stop them.

"Is that why you're torturing me like this?"

"No."

They both instantly know the lie. Jack gives himself away with his fear and Pitch doesn't need to call him on it.

"They don't know that we're friends, that you're not so bad, that things are pretty great right now…that things aren't so great right now…" Jack's hands shift so he's holding each wrist under his cheek. "That I died once…" His voice drops lower, "That I've almost died again lots of times."

"The Guardians are imbeciles."

Jack laughs on top of him. "They kind of are."

"You aren't exempt here." Pitch says lightly, easily. "Sanderson knows."

"He knows a little. Only the things I dream about…My human family, playing with my sister, epic snow days, partying with the guardians, hanging out with you, visiting Jamie. The good stuff."  
He keeps his face stoic, but feels a warming in his chest at the prospect that he invades good dreams for someone and not just nightmares. His hands trail up Jack's sides to his ribs.

"Sandy is so good. Too bright. He doesn't understand this thing we do."

"He is a wishing star, Jack."

"Is that what he is?"

"You didn't know?"

"Yeah...no..sort of? Not really. No one ever explains much, and Sandy's pictures are always up for interpretation...but I had the jist of it. a wishing star...what does that mean?"

"He embodies good. Peace. Aspirations and futures. Hopelessness and sorrow are not his domain."

"But he watches dreams die every night."

"So he does."

And Jack grins, a watery weak thing he buries in Pitch's robe. He likes the feel of Jack's lips smiling against him. The most foolish concept invades his mind then. That the Guardians and he are not so different.

That they all face despair.

It's a concept he can't entertain for long. He isn't equipped to acknowledge how deviant his methods up till now have been, how his motivations and goals have been the same as everyone else's but that he was the one messing up. That he could have spared himself his torture if he were different.

He is not different. Nothing would have changed. His very existence and nature is anathema. Neither side would fold, neither dared to show weakness until Jack Frost peeled back his own armor willingly.

Pitch finds his hand has somehow migrated to Jack's hair, the other back down to his hip. He does not remember moving them, but there they are, and Jack with his eyes closed happily accepting the kindness.

Kindness.

How has he fallen so far? Kindness is weakness. A chink in armor perfected over millenia. His very being has corrupted to let such emotions affect him. At this moment he does not desire violence or fear. His body is content with their position. It's disgusting and base and he knows it to be so, but cannot muster the equivalent feelings. He can tell his thoughts, the last stronghold of his previous person, will soon subcum as well.

Jack has changed him.

A power no one in the history of this planet has possessed till now, even himself. And it wasn't for lack of trying. He is doomed. Not even a century has passed and he is unrecognizable to himself. He already feels the casual creeping fingers of his resignation, acceptance. What will a few more decades bring? Will he become apathetic? Will he waste away, no longer desiring his lifeblood? Will his soul purpose be abhorrent and will he willingly starve himself for goodness? Will he become a Guardian?

Pitch scoffs, and the movement has Jack blinking owlish down at his face.

"What are you thinking about?"

He hadn't realized how long had passed in their silence, just lying there. Time is a lost concept now underneath the clouds, blocking the moon and stars.

"You've ruined me." He states simply, his eyes trained up.

"Have I?"

"Yes."

"Is it so bad?"

"No."


End file.
